Lead tracking is kind of like keeping tabs on all of your potential customers who are showing interest in your product or service. Imagine you run a store where someone comes in, shows interest, and then leaves without buying anything. In the digital world, lead tracking is to find out who that person is, why he came to the shop, and why he left without making a purchase. It will allow you to do what he wants and turn him into a customer the next time he comes to visit.
It is a crucial part that helps businesses grow, especially now, as the market is highly competitive. It is not just tracking people who may become your customers. The main goal is to guide the potential customer through a journey that will turn him into one of the customers.
What is the Lead Tracking Process?
The process of lead tracking is all about guiding the potential customers through a funnel from showing interest to making them a customer. Here are the 3 major steps of tracking a lead.
1. Identifying The Potential Leads
First of all, you need leads to track them, right? So, you need to spot people who are more likely to be interested in your business. You can find leads from various sources, like website visits and social media interaction, or you can use tools and software to find leads according to your business.
2. Quantifying Leads
You have to understand that all the leads are not equal; there are differences in quality and priority. Some of the leads are already ready to make a purchase, known as hot leads. Then, there are warm leads who are interested in a particular product and exploring it on various platforms. Lastly, there are cold leads who need convincing to become interested in an item and make a purchase.
3. Capturing Lead Information
After you are done collecting and quantifying your potential customers, you need to gather their contact information. For example, you can get their name and email, phone number, or social media account. In short, get any information that will allow you to communicate with them. The data is typically collected through signup forms on the website. Having this data means you can contact them in the future to keep the flow running and convince them to make a purchase.
Lead Tracking Metrics
Measuring the success rate of your lead tracking activities is a vital indicator of how well your sales and marketing strategies are performing. It shows how effective your sales funnel is and where you need to work for more improvement. Here is a list of some of the most important lead tracking metrics that you should keep an eye on.
- Lead Volume: This is just the number of leads you generate, indicating how efficient your marketing strategies are for capturing leads.
- Conversion Rate: The conversion rate indicates how many of your leads successfully turn into customers. It shows how effectively your sales funnel is operating.
- Lead Source: As mentioned earlier, all leads are not of the sale quality. Therefore, you need to keep track of the lead sources to understand which lead source is the most effective for your business.
- Lead Response Time: This metric represents how fast you or your sales team follow up with the lead after they show interest. It may seem less important, but actually, the faster you respond, the more chances you have of converting them into customers.
- Cost Per Lead (CPL): CPL shows how much you are spending to get a lead and turn it into a customer. This includes the cost of generating the lead, marketing cost, and the cost through the sales funnel. It shows how much Return On Investment (ROI) you get from a lead and whether your whole marketing process is cost-efficient or not.
- Lead Engagement: The more engaged the lead is with your brand, the more chances you have to turn them into customers. You need to check if they are opening your mail, visiting your website, or interacting with your social media posts.
What are The Best Practices for Effective Lead Tracking?
To ensure you get the maximum output from your lead tracking practices, you have to maintain some key practices. Follow the tips below for a smooth and organized lead tracking process.
1. Be Consistent
Consistency is a key element that includes regularly updating your lead tracking system with accurate data. If you keep the lead status updated, like the last conversation time or the lead source, you will get an overall idea of where the lead stands. Consistently updating lead information will help you avoid any confusion and allow you to grab every conversion opportunity.
2. Use Automation Where Possible
If you can properly use automation, your work will be cut in half, saving time and ensuring peak efficiency. You can automate anything from lead data entry to follow-up emails. It will also ensure that no leads are overlooked or skipped through the cracks. Tools like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other marketing automation platforms can handle these tasks, giving you enough time to build genuine relationships with the leads.
3. Segment Your Leads
We already know that all the leads are not equal in quality, so the approach for them will also be different. Therefore, create segments of your leads based on their interest, behaviors, responses, or any variable you need. It will allow you to customize your marketing approach according to your target lead’s characteristics, increasing your success rate.
4. Maintain Regular Follow-ups
Don’t wait too long to reach out to the leads or they may go cold. You need to knock them professionally every once in a while so that they don’t forget your name. You can utilize various communication mediums, like phone calls, emails, or social media. But don’t be too much pushy, just let them feel your presence in a friendly and helpful manner.
5. Monitor and Refine Your Process
Monitoring your lead tracking process is one of the must-do tasks that allow you to evolve. You need to analyze every step, every decision, and their outcomes to understand what goes wrong and what is working and what is not. It will indicate where you are stuck and need to work on to improve the whole process. It opens up the gates of new opportunities through feedback and refinement of your lead tracking strategies.
What are the Challenges in Lead Tracking?
Of course, lead tracking can level up your sales and marketing, but it comes with a bunch of challenges. If you can overcome these challenges, you will get to the peak potential of your lead tracking activities. Here are some of the most common challenges you will face while tracking your leads.
Data Overload
If you are not well prepared, you will easily get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data you get through various lead generation platforms, like email, social media, or website traffic. Data overload is one of the most common issues companies face when they fail or take too long to process all the data. As a result, the efficiency of the entire lead tracking system and the success rate drops significantly.
Inconsistent Data Entry
If you depend on manual data entry of your leads, maintaining consistency can be a big challenge. If anyone forgets to enter data, enters the wrong data, or somehow messes up the data of different leads, you will face some serious problems. So, if possible, try to automate this part of the process as it can be too complex and is a sensitive task.
Lead Quality Issues
You can not go for each and every lead you find from the sources because they are not worth the hassle. Quality is crucial in ensuring your efforts are properly used for quality leads. Suppose someone is not interested in your product or service, but randomly ended up on your website. If you keep wasting your time and efforts after such leads, your conversion rate will fall with the efficiency.
Lead Source Identification
While you can get overloaded with the amount of lead data, it becomes more challenging than ever to tag the leads according to their sources. Identifying the lead sources is a crucial task, allowing you to understand the authenticity of various sources and which source is more dependable for lead generation.
Managing Multiple Lead Source
You must utilize multiple lead generation sources rather than depending on a single source to keep the wheel moving. The more sources you have, the more lead you get. Sounds great, but the problem is managing all these platforms. You need regular activities tailored for each platform, which is a big challenge.
Slow Response Time
Speed is one of the most crucial factors in the process of tracking leads. You need to respond to the leads as soon as possible, especially the hot leads. If you are even a bit slow to respond, your competitors will steal your lead. Responding fast is the ultimate challenge in this process, as it depends on various complicated factors, like processing the raw data coming from the lead sources.
Automation in Lead Tracking
Similar to every other industry, automation in lead generation can be a game changer, increasing your productivity. You can save your time, effort, and money by utilizing automation tools in the system. Here is how automation can impact your lead tracking process:
Faster and Consistent Follow-ups
One of the major advantages of automation on lead tracking is instant and consistent follow-up with the leads. Automated emails, calls, and even chatbots can make your response time and follow-up faster and easier.
Lead Scoring Automation
You can use automated lead scoring systems to rank the leads based on various factors like behavior or interaction with your business. You can track who visits your website, who opens your promotional emails, or who downloads your content with automation. It will allow you to find out leads who are already interested in you and bring them to the sales lead.
CRM and Marketing Automation
Utilizing automation on the CRM system is a crucial step that ensures that every lead and their details are registered in the CRM and updated regularly. You can try various tools like Salesforce or HubSpot that will allow you to track everything from the first visit to the final purchase and sync all that data in real time.
Automated Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Nurturing leads who are somewhat interested in your business but are not ready to make a purchase right away can be tricky. With the help of automation, you can set campaigns that will automatically nurture your leads by sending them valuable content over time. You can also personalize these campaigns based on the lead behaviors to maximize the efficiency of your marketing campaigns.
Improved Lead Source Tracking
Integrating automation in lead tracking systems can automatically track where the leads are coming from without manual interaction. It saves a great deal of time and effort, making lead source tracking faster and more convenient.
AI and Predictive Lead Sourcing
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) with automation takes the lead tracking system to a whole new level. AI can gather data from past lead interactions and predict the probable outcomes. It will help you focus on the highly potential leads rather than wasting time on leads that won’t be beneficial in the future.
Automated Reporting and Analysis
Analysis and report is the final stage of the lead tracking system. It is a pretty complex task as you have to go through a large amount of data and analyze them. But, with the help of automation, lead analysis and reporting can be a piece of cake.
Benefits of Automation in Lead Tracking
The benefits list of automation in lead tracking is long as it can change the whole dynamics of the process. Here are some of the most impactful benefits of automatic lead tracking:
- It reduces manual tasks and saves a lot of time
- The response time is greatly improved with automation
- It increases the efficiency of the most complicated stages, especially scoring and nurturing
- The accuracy and consistency of data is improved across the entire system
- Provides pin-point analysis, helping in decision-making and refining your lead generation strategies
Lead Generation and Tracking with Lead Spider
To track your leads, you need to generate leads in the first place. Collecting leads can be a painful task, especially if you are looking for B2B leads. So, it would be cool if you could find leads with some clicks, right?
Actually, you can find high-quality B2B leads sitting in your room with some simple clicks. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Let us introduce one of the best lead generation tools in the market, LeadSpider. Now, you don’t need to go office to collect commercial leads to grow your business anymore. Using LeadSpider, you can find leads for any specific business industry and area. Here are some of the iconic features of LeadSpider:
- We offer a powerful lead-searching feature based on location, where you can find leads in your desired location or service area.
- We know that you may not need the leads of every business in an area, but what if you need to filter the leads according to your needs? Don’t worry; we offer an advanced filtering option where you can filter the leads based on various factors.
- We also feature real-time leads, ensuring you get leads before anyone else as soon as they appear.
- The interface of LeadSpider is user-friendly and minimal. We believe in simplicity so that you can get used to the software.
- You can save your found leads and export all the available contact information in Excel format. It is compatible with any CRM software you use to import them into your CRM in a flash.
- We offer Geo Mapping, which allows you to see the real-time location of your leads on the map. This is a crucial feature, especially for local businesses where you need to know the exact area of your leads to run a marketing campaign.
- One of the most important features we offer is the mobile friendliness of LeadSpider. We know that you may not have a laptop with you all the time, so we made sure that LeadSpider is mobile-friendly. With LeadSpider, you can generate leads whenever you want using just a smartphone.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the bottom line is that tracking the leads you generate is a crucial and challenging task. The process has several complex steps, and you can get overwhelmed if you try to do everything manually. Therefore, try implementing as much automation as possible in your lead tracking process. Finally, always remember to analyze the feedback so you can refine your lead tracking strategies to achieve the ultimate success.
FAQs
How to calculate CPL?
CPL, or Cost Per Lead, is not that hard to measure. The formula to calculate CPL is –
Total marketing cost / Number of generated leads
You can measure, on average, how much you spent to get every lead.
How to calculate the conversion rate?
The conversion rate of your leads indicates what percentage of your leads are finally purchasing from you. The formula is easy:
Conversion rate = (Number of conversions / Total number of leads) /100
How to prioritize the segmented leads?
You have to create segments of your leads in 3 categories: hot leads, warm leads, and cold leads. The priority will be the same in order: first, work on hot leads because they are ready to make a purchase. Then comes warm leads who are already interested and considering a purchase. Place the cold leads in the last part who need a long time nurturing to become a customer.